Ep. 150 Coping Skills to Ease Anxiety When a Crisis Shakes Your Midlife Calm

What do you do when everything falls apart?
Shifting from a reactive to a reflective mindset can make all the difference.

 In this episode, you’ll discover:

1.    A step-by-step process to ground yourself during emotional shock using body-based coping skills

2.    The “tend and befriend” mindset that helps you move through pain and anger with compassion

3.    Real-life stories showing how vulnerability—not anger—builds lasting strength in midlife

Feeling like everything is crumbling?
Tune in now to learn how to hold yourself with care, calm, and clarity when life hits hardest.

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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support.

Transcript

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover how to stay grounded when life falls apart. Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife minds to overcome anxiety, stop feeling like crap and become more present with your family, all while achieving greater success at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, a licensed clinical social worker with over 48, 000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast. Have you ever gotten a phone call, email, or text that changed everything in an instant? Maybe it was bad news about your health. Maybe you lost your job. Maybe you found out something about your partner that broke your heart, or maybe your child is struggling in a way you never imagined. When life falls apart like this, it can feel like the ground disappears beneath you. In an instant, the stability you counted on is gone. At best you feel desperate. At worst, you're completely lost. You aren't alone. These are hard times. And when the unexpected strikes, it can be especially difficult to find your footing and figure out how to move forward in a healthy way. I've sat with many people in a crisis. In today's episode, I wanna offer you practical coping skills that can help you find calm, stability, and a way forward. Let me begin with the obvious. If you're listening to this, I'm so sorry. I really am, but I'm glad you've reached out. And I hope this episode can be not only a bit of calm in this storm that you're going through, but offer you a bit of support. and at the end of the episode, I'll give you an inner challenge that you can begin to work on immediately to help you ground yourself as you move through this difficult time. As you move forward. When life hits you hard, your body can feel like it's been dropped into cold water. You go numb, everything slows down. That's emotional shock. In that moment, the best thing you can do is find an anchor, your breath, the feeling of your feet on the floor, or even the sound of your own voice saying, this is hard, but I'm still here. A few months ago, I was at a football game when one of my dearest friends texted me that she had cancer. I left the game with my head spinning. As I walked to my car, I just kept saying to myself, breathe. Feel your feet. Breathe. Feel your feet. I was literally walking down the sidewalk saying that out loud. Why? Because I knew that doing this would help my body begin to metabolize the stress hormones flooding my system. When you name tame and aim, you're not just calming your mind, you're helping your body process stress hormones like cortisol, so anxiety and fear can move through you instead of getting stuck. And every time you do this, you're building real emotional resilience. This isn't a one and done coping skill. It's something you can return to again and again, helping your mind, body, and heart work through the shock in a healthy way. This is the first place where you begin to tend and befriend, but then comes the next part. What will your mindset be toward this awful and unexpected life event? At first, you'll have your raw, immediate reaction. That's normal. I want you to notice without judgment whether your mindset leans externally towards blaming and unclaiming, or internally toward tending and befriending, you might remember these ideas from episode six and seven on emotional regulation because when terrible things happen in your life, you still get to choose what your mindset is, where you put your energy and how you move through this terrible thing. Will you tend and befriend yourself? Or blame and unclaim. Let me share a story. Years ago, a lawyer referred a client to me who'd been unjustly fired. The firing came out of nowhere and he was devastated. His anger was a 15 out of 10. He came into session full of rage and revenge. I listened and I truly empathized. His anger was completely understandable, but even after trying to help him regulate, he stayed stuck. Three days later, he called me and said his lawyer thought he had a strong case, but his anger was so intense that the lawyer wasn't sure he wanted to represent him. That was a turning point. My client came back to session and said, this is totally unfair, but what else can I be except angry? I looked at him and gently said. Maybe scared, sad, and what he said next is something I'll never forget. If I get scared or sad, I won't know what to do. How the hell do I move forward if I'm scared or sad? This is one of the most profound questions we face when life deals as a blow. Anger feels powerful. Fear and sadness feel vulnerable. Depending on your personality, anger may be your starting place, but it can't be your ending place because while anger gives you energy to go forward, it can also be rooted in poor judgment. so again, you return to the work of tending and befriending. Your anger may be real and justified, but it can block your access to the deeper emotions underneath. Fear. Sadness and vulnerability. Find a safe way to let those emotions live and move through you. If you are not sure how episode 145 is a great place to start where we talk about how to feel a really hard emotion, You can try journaling. You can write a poem. But it really helps the most to talk to someone you trust, whether it's a friend, therapist, or spiritual guide. The first steps in tending and befriending yourself when life falls apart is to ground yourself in the emotional shock name and tame the difficult feelings underneath the anger and choosing an internal, self-compassionate mindset so you move through this crisis in a loving, healthy way. This doesn't mean you won't have times of anger or blame, but it does mean that you are committed to moving through this in a way that they don't take over blocking mental clarity, which will help you make them many hard choices in front of you. While these are the first steps intending a befriending yourself when your life falls apart, it is also helpful to find people outside of your situation that can help you put words to all of this. Hospice programs, churches, and community centers often have trained listeners and grief counselors who can sit with you as you make meaning from this mess. Let's go back to the client who lost his job. Eventually we explored the difference between an external and an internal mindset. An external mindset would keep him stuck, blaming his boss. An internal mindset would reconnect him to his values, reminding him that he had done good work and could still move forward. I've seen cancer patients make the same shift. They start out blaming themselves, I should have eaten better. I should have quit smoking. But self-compassion leads to a deeper truth, that illness often has no logic. Their choices weren't made to harm themselves. There's a randomness to life that none of us can control, and in making meaning we tend and befriend again. This is how we acknowledge the deep vulnerability of being human. Something we all carry, but rarely confront until life brings it right to our doorstep. Often uninvited. That same client, the one who never thought he'd be in therapy, said to me at the end of treatment, I wish I had never met you, but if I hadn't, I might have become an old bitter alcoholic. Yes. When you blame and unclaim, it's so easy to turn to substances for companionship and to numb your complex and difficult feelings. But this angry man turned into a wise, middle-aged man. And how wise he was. Because the biggest challenge when life is unfair is to not let bitterness take over. And it will, unless you gently connect to who you are. A person who intentionally chooses to handle whatever life gives you in a healthy and way. And that's what this episode is about. Should you be going through a crisis? Continue to ground yourself. Name and tame what you feel. Let others help you make sense of the senseless, and choose to tend and befriend when everything in you wants to shut down. The people I've worked with over the years have shown me this truth that the antidote to bitterness. Is resilience, not the buzzy overused kind of resilience, but the real kind. The kind that's built when life takes you somewhere you never wanted to go, and you choose often, minute by minute. Not to give in, but to go through one breath, one step, one brave act at a time. From wrestling with life in this way, you'll find a strength you didn't know you had and a gratitude for things you once took for granted. You are stronger than you realize, but don't try to do it alone. Your phone can be a distraction. Don't let it become your best friend. Let people care about you. Let them show up. Let them bring you casseroles you don't really like, and when you make it through to the other side, you'll have something powerful to give back. In this episode, I tried to share the healing wisdom so many people I have worked with over the years have demonstrated to me as they have coped with their life falling apart. Grounding yourself, naming and taming, letting others help you and making sense of the senseless, all while choosing a mindset that allows you to learn to tend to befriend something you never wanted to go through. Your inner challenge this week is to think about your mindset and contemplate if you are tending and befriending. If you are in the middle of a storm right now. Thank you for listening. This takes courage. If you know someone in a crisis, please send them this episode. I hope this episode feels more like a companion than a prescription. I'll be back on Thursday to talk about how to cope with the deep exhaustion inherent in this type of crisis, as well as a gentle practice of receiving from others. Thanks for listening to creating Midlife Calm.